How to increase voter turnout

Tuesday

Dec 5, 2017 at 3:01 AM

The lackluster turnout in recent municipal elections, including the Barnstable Town Council race last month, is further evidence to support automatic voter registration — a system that automatically updates voters’ information whenever they alert one of several state agencies of a change of address or other pertinent change in their status.

The agencies include the Registry of Motor Vehicles, the Department of Revenue, MassHealth, and all public institutions of higher education. The bill would also let voters waive those updates if they want.

Among more than 50 groups backing the change is the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts and Common Cause Massachusetts.

“The League strongly supports automatic voter registration as the next logical step in the modernization of the electoral process here in Massachusetts,” said Meryl Kessler, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts. “AVR will improve the accuracy of voter rolls, create a more efficient and reliable voting system, help control the costs of voter registration over time, and improve the voting process on Election Day.”

Supporters said the new system could also help encourage more voters to show up at the polls on Election Day — including the nearly 700,000 eligible Massachusetts citizens not currently registered to vote.

Pam Wilmot, executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts, said an automatic voter registration bill has at least 81 co-sponsors in the 160-member House. Democratic Senate President Stan Rosenberg has indicated support for the idea, as well as 21 other senators.

“In this moment, when the health of our democracy is a great concern, and the security of elections is under scrutiny, our legislature can adopt a policy change that will make voting simpler, reduce government bureaucracy, and enhance democracy,” she said.

The Pew Research Center reported in 2012 that one of four eligible American citizens, or approximately 51 million people, were not registered to vote.

Multiple factors contribute to the low rates of voter participation in the United States. One factor undoubtedly is our voter registration system, which is appreciably more difficult than systems in other industrialized democracies, which use automatic and permanent voter registration.

Among the barriers to voter registration:

-- Mobility: Americans are highly mobile. Each time we move, we need to proactively update our voter registration.

-- Deadlines: According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 4.1 million Americans who tried to register to vote in 2014 were prevented from doing so by registration deadlines.

-- Knowledge: Another 1.9 million could not add themselves to voter rolls for the simplest of reasons – they simply did not know how.

With a streamlined system of gathering voter information, AVR can help eliminate each of these barriers to participation.

Massachusetts isn’t the first state to consider adopting the change. Oregon was the first state to get an automatic voter registration system up and running, and 230,000 voters registered in its first six months. In addition, more than 265,000 inaccurate registrations were updated.

Nine other states and the District of Columbia have already passed automatic voter registration: California, West Virginia, Alaska, Vermont, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Another proposal to increase voter turnout is Election Day registration — or same-day registration — that would let voters register and cast their ballots on Election Day or during the early voting period.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 14 states plus the District of Columbia — including Connecticut, New Hampshire and Maine — currently offer same-day registration.

It is often noted that voting is one of the most important duties exercised by citizens. Unfortunately, voter turnout in America is alarmingly low. Since 1900, presidential elections have regularly seen American voter turnout rates hover between 50 percent and 65 percent. The American Presidency Project at the University of California-Santa Barbara notes that Barack Obama’s first election in 2008 election saw a voter turnout of 58.2 percent. Voter turnout in Donald Trump’s 2016 election was estimated at 55.5 percent.

A Pew Research study from May 2017 found the United States ranked 27th among the world’s most developed countries when it came to voter turnout. And while turnout is not good at federal-level elections, it's even worse in local elections.

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